She stopped me as I was filming and said, almost casually, “Why are you saying Palestinians? Most of the people here don’t identify as Palestinians.”
We were standing in the middle of Tel Aviv on Saturday night, during one of the largest protests that Palestinian citizens of Israel have held in recent memory: a mass demonstration — described by local commentators as “historic” — against the organized crime that has been tearing through our communities with impunity. Tens of thousands of people (organizers estimated as many as 100,000) had come to demand the most basic and urgent right to live without fear.
And yet, at that moment, the protest’s central contradiction surfaced. Even here, at a march against our own deaths and abandonment by the government, naming ourselves as Palestinians felt disruptive, something in need of correction.
People had driven for hours from the Galilee in the north and the Naqab in the south to make their voices heard in the heart of the Israeli metropolis. They came with the knowledge that this government is more comfortable watching Palestinians kill one another than taking responsibility for dismantling the crime networks operating freely in our towns.
The presence of bereaved families made that indifference impossible to ignore, at least for those who were there. These were parents, siblings, and children whose lives had been shattered by violence, who still chose to stand in public and demand accountability.
Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel attend a protest against rising violent crime in Palestinian society, in Tel Aviv, January 31, 2026. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Among them was Khitam Abu Fanni, the mother of Firas Abu Fanni, who was killed at the age of 29 last September, leaving behind a wife and a seven-month-old baby. Standing on stage, she spoke through tears: “Firas was my firstborn. He was my backbone. He had so many dreams.” Each time she repeated her demand — to find her son’s killer, to deliver justice — the crowd fell silent in the presence of her raw devastation.
Nearby, a young girl held a photograph of her brother. Written across it were the words: “My brother’s blood isn’t cheap.” Around her, thousands chanted against violence, against abandonment, against a reality in which Palestinian death has become normalized. The protest was overwhelming in its scale and its pain: a collective refusal to accept a system that treats our lives as expendable.
And yet, despite the magnitude of the demonstration, and the noteworthy presence of as many as 20,000 Jewish Israelis (according to organizers), it barely registered in mainstream Israeli media. The country’s major outlets reduced the event to brief, dismissive segments.
Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched network, devoted less than a minute to the protest in its Saturday night edition. During an interview with Ra’am lawmaker Mansour Abbas, far-right commentator Amit Segal quickly redirected the discussion away from the protest itself and toward political maneuvering.
This erasure says less about the protest and more about the media ecosystem itself. For years, Israeli media has either ignored the crisis of organized crime in Palestinian communities or framed it as a “cultural problem,” reinforcing racist narratives that portray Palestinians as inherently violent rather than systematically neglected. Police inaction, state abandonment, and the free operation of criminal networks are treated as background noise, if they are acknowledged at all.
Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel attend a protest against rising violent crime in Palestinian society, in Tel Aviv, January 31, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
A hollowed-out protest
Yet criticism has also come from within Palestinian society, with many activists left deeply disappointed by what they described as the protest’s visual and political emptiness.
Wary that some political parties and movements may try to monopolize the gathering and use it to promote their own ends rather than keeping the focus on the urgent issue at hand, the organizers had explicitly requested no party symbols or movement T-shirts. But they also requested no Palestinian flags — not even the watermelon, a symbol that is often subtle enough to escape Israeli censorship. Yet while Palestinian symbols were carefully excluded, some Jewish-Israeli participants came bearing Israeli flags, seemingly oblivious to (or dismissive of) the sensitivities of those whose communities are bleeding.
As journalist Mustafa Qablawi argued in a popular Instagram post, this absence hollowed the protest. Palestinians are not being killed in a vacuum: The violence is embedded in a political reality shaped by discrimination, chronic policing failures, and state neglect. To strip the protest of Palestinian identity is to strip it of its true essence.
Even before the protest, I had questioned its location. Why Tel Aviv? When I asked some of the organizers, their answer was pragmatic: Tel Aviv would “grab the attention of Israelis,” they said. But beyond sacrificing the chance to strengthen our towns and villages as spaces for political organizing, Tel Aviv is also the city where many Palestinians often feel politically unseen — a place that presents itself as pluralistic and liberal, yet invariably fails to meet its own standards.
During the protest, it became increasingly clear to me that protesting in Tel Aviv as a Palestinian comes with an unspoken condition: compromise. Raising a Palestinian flag is considered too controversial, equally likely to alienate “center-left” Israelis who want to “support Arabs,” and to invite police repression — something we have seen repeatedly at Palestinian-led protests in Haifa, Nazareth, and Umm Al-Fahm.
This time, the organizers complied with those constraints — and received nothing in return. No meaningful media coverage. No political response. No protection. Homicides continued the very same day and in the days that followed, bringing the death toll from organized crime this year already to more than 30.
The price of compromise
Before attending the protest on Saturday, I was skeptical, but I told myself that perhaps the leadership saw something I didn’t. Maybe this was a moment to mobilize, not to overanalyze. But two encounters at the demonstration only deepened my sense that something was off.
First, two Jewish-Israeli women approached me and a friend and told us they were there to support “Arabs” and their right not to be killed by criminal gangs. Almost seamlessly, they added that they hoped we would vote for the Democrats, the Zionist center-left party led by former army general Yair Golan. The ease with which Palestinian grief was folded into electoral campaigning was jarring — a reminder that even Israelis who come to protest on our behalf often struggle to see us beyond our demographic or political utility, let alone as Palestinians.
Before leaving, I filmed a short video in English, saying: “More than 50,000 Palestinians gathered today in the center of Tel Aviv.” A man interrupted me: “You forgot to say that Jewish Israelis are also here protesting with you.” I agreed and re-recorded it.
Then, a young woman about my age approached me. Genuinely puzzled, she asked: “Why are you saying Palestinians? I don’t think most people here identify as Palestinians.” “How do you know?” I asked. “I live here,” she replied confidently. “I know.”
She likely assumed I was a foreign journalist; it did not occur to her that Palestinians would come to Tel Aviv and insist on naming themselves as such. And perhaps she was right: There were no flags, no symbols, no visual cues. As a friend later put it, the protest felt uncanny — almost foreign.
That sentence stayed with me: “Why are you saying Palestinians?” The truth is that naming ourselves is not incidental. It is the core of our struggle.
When we cannot comfortably acknowledge our national identity at a protest against the cheapness of our lives, something far deeper is being exposed — not only about Israeli society, but about the narrow limits imposed on Palestinian presence, grief, and political imagination.
Samah Watad is a Palestinian journalist and investigative researcher based in Israel, covering politics and social issues.